Maths lesson required, followed by logic lesson

The Angry Video Game Nerd - known as James Rolfe to his closest (and his helpmate Mike Mattei) – provides the ultimate nostalgia trip for people, usually guys, who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, excoriating games that in no way justified their price, indeed in no way justified their existence.  The Nerd’s rants on YouTube (because I’m too cheap to subscribe to Cinemassacre) do digress occasionally into other mediums of popular culture – one of his particular bugbears being Hollywood’s numbering of its sequels.  The modern Tinseltown preference is to dispense with numbers altogether and have subtitles below the main one, in aeffort to avoid sounding derivative (The Fast and the Furious phenomenon being a notable exception). 

Rocky Balboa’s naming diverges from this but seemed to subvert the previous four successors to Rocky.  The Nerd’s wrath though was reserved especially for the Rambo quadrilogy.  All three films following the original violate all rules of succession.  The first was called First Blood, about a Vietnam veteran struggling to adapt and having a shoot-out with the local police and the national guard. The second decided to append the protagonist’s name to the front making a mockery of the part two as was Rambo: First Blood Part II – if anything, it should have been First Blood Part II: Rambo, though this would still have been nonsensical.  This was followed by Rambo 3, even though the first one wasn’t called Rambo and the second one Part II, though given the Reaganite, tub-thumping idiocy that into which the franchise had now descended, this probably isn’t surprising.  Given that there was no longer any memory to sully, Sylvester Stallone went ahead with a fourth instalment two decades after the third.  Dropping all pretences of sequencing this was generally released as John Rambo, which essentially disowns the progenitor of the whole series and all that followed.  Mind-blowing and mind-numbing at the same time. (Interestingly, all those fought by John Rambo are now viewed in the opposite light – the police are almost sanctified by Middle America following 9/11; the Vietnamese are now allies of the USA while the Soviet Union no longer exists; Rambo’s Afghan friends are now fought by the West; and even Burma is now on friendly terms with the USA).

In relation to this, I saw the trailer for Krrish 3 on YouTube, being a sucker for fantasy films where people have super-powered abilities. It also recalls what Piscine Patel said in the Life of Pi that in the absence of American comic books, Krishna was his superhero.  Afterwards, I was intrigued to learn about this Bollywood movie’s predecessors.  What I found takes Rambo’s headband, ties it round the Vietnam vet’s goollies and tightens, so hands-down does it defeat the Stallone series in trashing notions of follow-ups numbering.  Hilariously, the protagonist who gives his name to the latest offering wasn’t even in the first of the (current) trilogy, Koi... Mil Gaya, being primarily about his father, Rohit, in the latter’s youth befriending a lost alien (there is a lot of debate of whether E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was based on this, which comes from an original script from Satyajit Ray).  It is not disastrous to have the second film called Krrish, just as Christopher Nolan’s Batman series continually changed how the series was named.  What is terrible though is to jump from Krrish to Krrish 3, just to give it the feel of a trilogy, insulting the intelligence of its audience.  Only the whimsy of the original super-band The Traveling Wilbury’s could pull this off, their second outing being Volume 3 because key member Roy Orbison had died before any second album and in honour of him they skipped it, numbering-wise.  Krrish 3 looks decent (as was intended, in matching Hollywood’s special effects), if not particularly original but why oh why did it have to have that name.